A Guileless Man Destroyed in His Honorable Grave

Have you ever had a really great teacher? Somebody who made a permanent difference in your life? Now, imagine that some ambitious academic decides that this teacher, this great teacher, makes a perfect patsy for a career move based on political correctness. Why is he a perfect patsy? Because he's seven years dead before you bring your first accusation of sexual misconduct.

That is the present plight of Paul Suerken, for generations a revered and beloved figure at Mercersburg Academy, which has somehow managed its way onto Business Insider's list of the 50 Most Elite Boarding Schools in the United States.

I don't know what to do first. Tell you about Paul Suerken the man and the teacher, or about the foul letter I received from the Head of School and the President of the Board of Regents denouncing and destroying his entire life and career in furtherance of one woman's ambition to be head of school in the Grottlesex world. Evidence? Drummed up hearsay, 20 years old and unsubstantiated by anything a court of law would tolerate. Here are the key parts of  The Letter.

Paul Suerken. He was above all a gentle man, with music and literature flowing equally in his veins, and overflowing with infectious enthusiasm. He spoke with his hands, which were invariably outstretched expansively to include the students in a world of sound and sense and beauty. He was a music teacher, an inspirational glee club director, and a tough, sharply focused teacher of English literature. He made you love what you were reading, he made you write about it, he graded you hard, and sat patiently with you to explain what you had done wrong and how to do it better next time.

I knew this man. He was there for me in some tough personal times, always as an understanding and insightful friend who knew how to make you smile and ingenious ways of making you see a brighter side. In class, he always addressed us as "Gentlemen," and in the four years I knew him, he was never less than a perfect gentleman himself.

Now, his reputation lies in ruins thanks to unprovable allegations levied by unidentified persons who accuse him of sexual misconduct from 20 years ago, summoned from the ether 7 years after his death. Not coincidentally, this follows in the wake of the character assassination of Bret Kavanaugh in the Congress of the United States by absurd accusations volunteered 30 years after the fact by an unchallenged and aberrant partisan. Who does this serve? As always, the career agenda of someone(s) pretending to be endowed with integrity, honesty, and moral authority.

Result? Paul Suerken has just been annihilated by a self-aggrandizing, conniving head of school aiming for a new position in the Grottlesex world, where raking up ancient sexual crimes has become a ticket to success in the new victim based gulag of academia.

Her name is Katherine Titus. Head of School at the Mercersburg Academy. Dominant buddy of the otherwise undistinguished heiress who got to head the Board of Regents by giving Mercersburg $100 million. Imagine how those conversations go. We know about Middlebury College, the most expensive college in the United States, now attended by the richest skiers and Stalinists in New England. We know about the Columbia Graduate School of Education, sun source of absolutist pedagogical doctrine. We know about the sexistly oppressive hell of being Assistant Head of School at St. George's, one of the Holy Five Grottlesex shrines. We know about the purgatory of a term in Jersey's lowlife Pingry School. Anything to get back to elitist paradise. Anything. And maybe a Great Leap Forward to Head of School at Choate-Rosemary Hall, where the politically correct victim mongers have been thriving on investigations of ancient unprovable and undocumented sexual abuses. Paul Suerken. He's perfect. Revered. Old time. Sitting duck. Because dead duck.

On to you. Got it yet?